Comes with: clock kit (includes all parts, programmed chips and LCD), coin battery, enclosure, 9VDC power supply for 220V or 110V. You’ll need some basic soldering & hand tools that are necessary to assemble it! The good news is that this is a pretty basic kit and even if its your first soldering project, it shouldn’t take more than 2 or 3 hours to put together For much more information including parts list, instructions, videos, etc. check out the MONOCHRON website and you can order one here!

We started shipping and we’ve already had customers making them, the first customer has said “Assembly was a snap and it works great.” – thanks SSquire!

There are a lot of details there, but I was not able to determine an ‘energy star’ sort of rating for this clock. I, and many people I know, are starting to making conscious purchasing decisions based on the cradle to grave cost of products. Thanks /pauric

Hmm, not sure what you mean by “energy star” – we dont make refrigerators 🙂 The clock uses a very efficient display with LED not EL back-lighting. So, altogether its <50mA at 5V so thats a quarter of a Watt. The power supply is high-efficiency switching style (NOT a leaky 'wall wart'). So total power consumption is 9V * 50mA * lets say 80% efficient = half a Watt. If you dim the display, it may be lower!
Is that what you're asking?

The energy star rating system is a scheme that some governments run to rate appliances based on energy consumption – ie in the case of a washing machine, electricity to run the machine + energy to heat the water is taken into account. It’s a system where products are ranked against their peers, or some standard which they should achieve – the better an appliance does than the mean, the higher its rating.

At a generous estimate of 0.5 watt consumption, you can be sure this clock draws less than your microwave, stereo, TV or DVD player in standby. Infact, you could have a few hundred of these clocks plugged in and still use less energy than a single pilot light in a gas furnace.

When I said ‘energy star sort of rating’ I didnt expect it to be taken so literally (o; certainly not expecting comparisons with microwave ovens!!

Put it like this, if I wanted to be completely granola-crunchy I wouldnt buy any of the OSH clocks here and just hack one of those mechanical quartz clocks that run on a single AA.

However I’m not a complete hippy, but lets say I wanted to go off the grid, need to carefully manage my power usage and was torn between the ice tube and the pong clock. It might be nice to know how much energy both consume in terms of kwh or even more consumer friendly at a hypothetical 10c / kwh.. what is the estimated cost of running a given OSH for a year. Such information is found on energy star labels… why not take the lead and start something here?

hi pauric, the monochron uses half a watt. here’s the math we did – multiply 0.5 W* 365 d/y * 24 h/d / 1000 = 4.5 KWh per year. at 10 cents per KWh, the monochron costs 5 cents to run for the year. The ice tube clock costs perhaps 50 cents. perhaps this why energy star is only for large things, if we make an OSH microwave or dryer we’ll consider this.

it costs more to post these messages with your giant computers and ours 🙂

if you’d like to lead the charge with OSH energy ratings please do, we’re going to stick to regular ole’ OSH 🙂